How The Owners Destroyed The National Hockey League

[Itsthetruth]

CounterPunch
February 22, 2005

How Owners Destroyed the NHL
CSI: Hockey
By DAVE ZIRIN

There's nothing left but the autopsy and it doesn't take William Peterson - or even David Caruso - to decipher who killed the National Hockey League. The season is cancelled. The accusations are flying. But the most deafening sound is silence. There is no outcry in the streets. There has been no Million Hockey Fan March. 77% of Canadians said in a poll they could care less. Substitute shows on ESPN2 are twice as popular as last year's NHL games, which garnered a miserable 0.2 rating, just below the Black Israelites and anything with Tucker Carlson. "It's not a good sign when your replacement programming is outperforming the NHL," said one ESPN executive. The sport - in short - is a corpse.

Their road to Armageddon began thirteen years ago when they hired a slick NBA marketing whiz named Gary Bettman to be their commissioner. Bettman stated proudly that he had never set foot in an NHL arena, but knew how to "grow" the sport. Unfortunately he knew zero about hockey, probably thinking Guy Lafleur was a Toronto based escort service.

He saw the future of ice hockey and, unfathomably, saw Dixie. Bettman expanded the league to thirty teams, putting the sport in places like Nashville, Atlanta, Raleigh. Phoenix and Columbus. The NHL owners sat back and collected hundreds of millions of dollars in expansion fees, giving out fat contracts along the way, with no thought to the long-term consequences. Predictably, these new revenue streams were shockingly shallow. The big national TV contract Bettman promised never came and the NHL was left with unknowable new teams like the Hurricanes, Coyotes, and Predators playing in half empty arenas.

The money wasn't there. The attendance, which accounted for 80% of revenues, was down. The new territory was showing as much chance of success as an ice rink in hell. None of this was helped by a defense-oriented style of play that limited scoring to historic lows. Bettman, who as stated, doesn't know a hockey puck from a sausage patty, has been clueless, unlike NBA commissioner David Stern, on how to tweak rules to present a more exciting, offensive-minded product. As Sports Illustrated pointed out, the top scoring team in 2003-2004 would have ranked 21st in 1985-86.

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[Spazito]

1. Maybe now we can bring back actual hockey again...

instead of what was merely passing as hockey these days. The only real hockey in recent years was during the Olympics, imo.

[senseandsensibility]

2. I agree

The players held out because they know the owners are not losing as much if at all as they say they are. You have to ask yourself why would a person who is savvy enough at business to amass the kind of money it would take to own a team be willing to lose money year after year as the owners say they are. The answer is, of course, that they are not or they would be willing to open their books to the public to show the red inked bottom line. They also don't want to show the book-cooking shenanigans that is happening on those books lest the Canadian or American IRS's see.
Unfortunately, the corporate media in both Canada and the U.S. is portraying the millionaire players as being too greedy and destroying the sport. 67% of respondents on ESPN blame the owners. And, as in American politics, the loyal opposition refuses to play hardball and use the same dirty tactics.

[SaveElmer]

3. They need to contract

Dump the teams in Florida, Carolina ,Arizona...get back to the smaller more viable league they had before. Of the southern teams only Dallas seems to have gained a following

[DefenseLawyer]

4. It still amazes me

that people who should know better refer to this as a "strike" and have no idea what the issues are, but automatically assume it was the "greedy" players demanding more money to play. Of course I'll bet none of them ever turned down a raise in their own job.
I think the whole salary cap issue was a ruse. Come on $42.5 is offered, but $45 is a deal breaker? Not if you are negotiating in good faith. No, I think their goal was to break the union, destroy the league and start over. Good luck with that, morans.